tech
January 8, 2026
‘I wanted that Raiders of the Lost Ark excitement
‘There was no animation software in those days. So I videotaped my brother David running, jumping and climbing in a car park’
TL;DR
- Programming in the 1980s required self-teaching and submitting games on floppy disks.
- Prince of Persia's development was inspired by games like The Castles of Dr Creep and films like Raiders of the Lost Ark.
- Animation was created by manually digitizing photographs of videotaped movements.
- To overcome memory constraints, a 'Shadowman' character was introduced, and byte-shifting was used.
- Combat animations were rotoscoped from a scene in The Adventures of Robin Hood.
- The game was initially released on the dying Apple II platform but later succeeded on other platforms.
- Prince of Persia influenced later 3D platformers like Tomb Raider and Uncharted.
- The game's success rescued the developer financially after another game, The Last Express, flopped.
- The game's animation techniques were unusual for the video game industry at the time, foreshadowing closer ties between film and technology.
Continue reading the original article